


go home

by sacae



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken | Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, EDM/classical mashup, M/M, Slow Burn, not actually a university or coffee shop au despite appearances, wubs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-02-11 11:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12934548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacae/pseuds/sacae
Summary: A concert soloist and composer even from a young age, Rath is already successful and respected as a musician, and cares about few other things. Somehow, through chance and shared obsession, he meets Wil, who works two part-time jobs and has nothing in common with anything else in Rath's life - except that he asks to collaborate with Rath on a song. Wil's dramatically different genre and drastically different circumstances start to pry Rath's narrow world wide open, and they both are forced to seek the will to confront their own looming pasts and the uncertain future ahead.Even though Wil really just wanted to make music together.(if home is where the heart is, then isn't it just carried in our chest?)





	1. a new (old) place

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote up some notes on the music involved, including links to audio references, but they got really long so I put them at the end

Around his mid-teens, Rath went through one good growth spurt that put him above most adults, and then never grew again. He was far from short, so he rarely gave it much thought, except for one occasion in his fourth year of college, when he put on a pair of slacks for a recital and abruptly realized that it was a pair he hadn't worn since his third year of highschool. They had, at once, fit him perfectly and filled him instantly with the uneasy sensation that they no longer belonged to him.

Being back in Lycia felt like that.

(His feet remembered the layout of the streets better than his head did, and after two years on the coast of Etruria, Caelin's dry, gentle breeze smelled like his childhood had risen from his own memories to permeate the air. The birds had higher, sweeter voices here than the gulls from the coast; he didn't miss the seabirds' calls, but he hadn't thought he missed these either.)

He moved back around the middle of summer, with plenty of time to get settled in at his new, single bedroom apartment, but the first couple nights, he stayed, again, at the manor with Pent and Louise. Louise had fallen ill around the time of his graduation ceremony, so while she had watched the video feed from home, Pent had traveled to attend in person on his own and then left swiftly to return to her side. Louise's condition had greatly improved in the month since, and they were both eager to catch up with him, so dinner on the night of his return looked like a feast.

"How did you like Etruria?" asked Louise from across the table, with her ever gentle, glowing way of smiling. Her eyes gave Rath the impression of an old homesickness, the feeling that she was leaning closer with a hope of breathing in the smell of brine again from the sound of his recollection of it alone. "Did you like the old buildings?"

"They were interesting," Rath conceded, with truth. He didn't care much for architecture as a whole, but the vividly colored houses dotting the landscape and the old-fashioned detailing on even plain railings were starkly distinct from those of Caelin's more subdued palette. Though it hadn't been his first time in Etruria, he hadn't had the chance before to take in the average person's surroundings, rather than extravagant hotels and concert halls. Louise and Pent peppered him with a few more questions about the weather, the food, the transportation, all of which he fielded succinctly and without much detail, but they were, at least, accustomed to his reticence.

"More importantly, Rath, was it worth it?" prodded Pent, with clear expectancy.

"They had a good program," Rath replied, holding his gaze, but Pent wasn't satisfied with that.

"Don't you remember what you said to us before you left? 'A musician doesn't need to pursue a high-level degree to be a musician.' Do you still feel that way now?"

His opinion hadn't changed. More than that, to Rath, his words had been only a statement of a fact. A musician could still be exceptional without a degree of any kind. He had been a musician before his master's degree, and he was still a musician after. To him, it didn't deny any value in study; he continued to study because he found it fulfilling.

He hadn't made himself clear last time, and now was no longer the time to say those thoughts. Pent, and Louise as well, were watching his face intently and hoping for a very different reassurance.

"Etrurian thought has a different approach to composition than any I had considered before," he offered instead, to Pent's visible delight.

The rest of dinner was spent discussing mostly music, which was much easier to converse at length about, and because Rath had spent most of the past day on a plane, they agreed to let him skip dessert to rest. Louise got up at the same time as he did to clear his place at the table, taking his plate right out of his hands.

"Let me take care of it," she insisted, smiling.

"Thank you," he said with faint reluctance, because he knew arguing would be nothing but a futile effort here. Regardless of decorum, he thought she could use the rest just as much as him, if not more, but there was no winning against her when she had already decided on something.

"Your mother would be so proud of you," Louise told him then, in a voice so soft and warm it was unearthly. The lingering aftertaste of the meal felt like ash on Rath's tongue.

He had no other obligations for the next month and a half, except to unpack, buy furniture, and be ready for his return to the university. Instead, without any reason to keep a routine, he lost himself to a fugue of sleep and the sound of the morin khuur.

\--

When Rath had first attended Araphen as an undergrad, Pent had gifted him a new coffee maker as a housewarming present. It had served him well all through college and even followed him to Etruria, and there had only been a handful of times in the six years since he received it when he drank coffee brewed by anything else.

It broke down the night before his first day of the new semester. Rath had no idea why; to someone with a better grasp on the mechanics of coffee makers, it might have even been an easy fix. The next morning, after he woke up, promptly forgot that it had stopped working only about twelve hours ago, and filled it with more water and beans to brew, he contemplated his possible helplessness with machines as he gazed down the plug in his hand he had pulled out to stop the spew of smoke coming out of the coffee maker's seams.

He had no time to buy a new coffee maker before class, let alone learn a new craft entirely to fix this one. He looked up a coffee shop along the way instead, and ended up standing before a brown-haired barista who smiled at every customer too genuinely for the time of day. The man wasn't slacking; he went straight from fixing the last customer's order to fixing his attention on Rath's face.

"G'morning, sir, what can I get for you?"

"Large dark roast." The nametag he was wearing said Wil. Rath found himself squinting at it to determine if there was a second "L" hidden somewhere in the scrawl, with no luck. Wil's gaze flicked down to the order screen, and he responded at the same time as he tapped away at it.

"Got it, that'll be-" And that must have been the moment when he glanced over and took a proper look at Rath, because with an abruptly slack-jawed look, he flung his focus on his job straight from the premises. "You go to Araphen?"

The jacket. He'd seen the university's crest pressed onto his jacket. Rath wasn't a morning person, and if he was straight with himself, he'd grown too dependent on caffeine. He couldn't collect his thoughts well enough to answer right away, or decide if he even wanted to, but while he must have stared numbly for a second or two, it wasn't long before Wil's expression collapsed in almost overstated mortification. "Sorry, sorry, large dark roast, right? I'll get that for you right away." He rattled off the price for the coffee, and Rath thought that was that, but as Rath handed him the payment he started up again. "Are you a music major? You must be, right? Singing? Instrument?"

Rath couldn't tell Wil to stop talking and work, because even as he kept asking questions, he had turned to set up the machine to brew Rath's order. Out of sleep deprivation, most likely, Rath replied, "You're applying?"

Wil laughed out a startled, self-deprecating noise, and made a couple hurried slicing motions with his hand across his neck. "No, no, no, I'd never get in, I can't sing or play anything." The person behind Rath in line coughed loudly. "Oh! Right! I still need your name for your order, sir, and I'll be right with you, ma'am, I'm very sorry!"

With that, the topic was dropped. The other barista called out his name when the order was ready, and Rath drained the whole barely-decent cup long before the soles of his shoes hit campus grounds.

\--

Rath ordered a new coffee maker in between classes and sprung for the extra cost of one-day shipping. He went to the coffee shop twice more before it arrived; the barista was different when he went back to the coffee shop later that same day, and then different again the next morning. The coffee didn't taste any better or worse for it, and Rath didn't give it a second thought.

But that evening, when he walked onto the subway platform on his way back from class, he heard a busker's song.

He was a drummer. Not the kind with a set of drums, but with a plastic bucket held steady between his knees and a pair of forks in each hand. With his work apron traded for a heavy coat with a dull hue, he could have passed for another person entirely, years older, but when a passerby stopped to toss coins into the hat he had set out, the bright customer-service smile Wil gave was unmistakable.

The brief acknowledgment didn't interrupt Wil's rhythm, and neither did Rath. He had time before his train arrived, so instead he stood back and listened.

Despite his claims, Wil knew what he was doing. Doubling the forks increased the weight of his strikes, which in turn increased the volume, and he timed the inevitable noise of them clinking together to become a part of the song. He held one main, steady rhythm, but would weave in a second, sometimes a third, rough and rapid, the beats of which he would change as they dropped in and out. He made it look effortless; if Rath didn't know what he was looking for, he wouldn't even be able to spot where half the sounds Wil made were coming from. He was far beyond the level of an amateur.

Only one other person put coins in his hat while Rath was watching. Wil kept going until a train rolled in, but ended his performance abruptly as the platform was swallowed up in the roar; he snagged his cap up off the ground and pocketed the change from it, and then flipped his bucket and dumped the hat and forks inside as he hauled it up onto one shoulder.

The train hissed to a stop as Wil stood. Their paths would cross on Rath's way to boarding; an erratic echo of metal and plastic still lingered in his skull, and he let it draw him in.

"It sounds like you can play something," he called out in passing. Wil must not have spotted him until then, because he nearly jumped a foot out of his skin and swiveled to face Rath with eyes like saucers.

"Rath-!? Your name was Rath, right?" he exclaimed, but Rath didn't have a reason to stop and talk to him at length, not with the train's open doors waiting just beyond. He gave a nod of acknowledgment and continued on his way. "Uh, thank you!" came a last shout at his back.

Rath regretted not having a music player with him; the beat came from somewhere far outside the realm of music Rath lived in and stuck itself to him firmly, enough that he itched to drown out the ringing in his ears all the way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the morin khuur is a stringed instrument in the same family as the erhu. given Rath's schooling in music is totally foreign, his playing is non-traditional, so you could imagine something like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1wmAa0_YTA) as reference. he's less of a composer than he is a musician, and his own songs often lack an "exciting climax" factor, for better or for worse. in a way, although he's a soloist by trade, he has a structural focus in how he approaches music that more resembles the sensibilities of someone playing bass for a group, lol.
> 
> Wil's music is theoretically EDM (or maybe rock/EDM fusion), but he misses the mark on a lot of the genre conventions, probably the most damning point being that his songs usually lack, like, chill. his music is generally only relaxing in the way that banging on piano keys is relaxing. since he doesn't have (or play, really) his own instruments, he just uses program-generated ones for the most part. they tend to fall a little flat, but he usually manages to use that to good effect. he's heavy on percussion and dissonance and pretty much always throws in an electric guitar somewhere. although not really an EDM artist since most of their songs don't have a dance beat, [MARETU's work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI-D1WKqTck) is a pretty good approximation of what Wil's music might sound like. (fair warning, the song linked starts out soft but then gets gritty really suddenly)
> 
> all of the songs in this fic are named (at least roughly) after [songs from the fe7 ost](http://fireemblem.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Music_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Blazing_Blade). it can be assumed that fic songs bear some resemblance in mood, melody, composition, etc. to their namesakes, but in genre they're mostly wildly different so imagine what you will.
> 
> also I'm actually a complete casual when it comes to music so sorry in advance for any technical details I'm gonna fuck up. and have likely already fucked up. be gentle with me


	2. a new (old) sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and then there's Wil.

"He must think I'm an idiot _and_ a hobo now," Wil moaned at a coworker over a pile of half-completed table settings.

"Who thinks you're a hobo?" asked his boss as she walked out of the kitchen. Lyn slid right into a chair at the table with them and reached for a stack of cloth napkins to help fold, in spite of Wil's yelp of protest.

"What are you doing, folding dinner napkins again? You're the manager, Lyn, the owner! Don't you have better things to do with your time?!" he whined, and splayed himself out across the table to play at a slow grab for her napkins.

"And as the owner I help with whatever share of the work I want," she shot back, just like always, with sharp eyes glittering.

The server cleared his throat from his seat beside her. "Good afternoon, Lyndis," he interjected, with a well-mannered smile she happily returned.

"Hello, Kent. Has your life been as exciting as Wil's since yesterday?"

"Hey!"

Kent sighed right over Wil's protest. "His life doesn't sound very exciting either. A man he served at the coffee shop heard him drumming on the subway platform."

"You were busking there again? Wil, you know there are laws against that."

"Never mind that," Wil brushed off quickly. "It was the guy from Araphen, Lyn! Araphen University!"

Lyn quirked an eyebrow. "The guy who said about five words to you? The one you told you couldn't play anything?" Wil buried his face in his hands and groaned. "So what did he say?" she prompted, brushing aside his melodramatics.

"That it sounded like I can play something after all," he replied. Lyn and Kent both stared at him, for a solid, pregnant pause. "That's it," Wil concluded.

"That's it?" echoed Kent.

"Well then he had to catch his train," Wil scrambled to clarify, either to defend Rath or just himself.

"Really, Wil," Lyn piped up again, "aren't you a little too hung up on this guy?"

"I'm not hung up on him!" he wailed. "I just wanted to vent about making a fool of myself! And he didn't go to the coffee shop this morning so I'll probably never see him again anyway!"

"You sound totally hung up on him," said Lyn.

"Do you have a crush on this man?" Kent ventured uncertainly. Wil dropped his face in his pile of napkins and let out a noise like a dying animal.

"I'm being attacked from all sides," he lamented, only partly muffled. Lyn kept folding napkins without missing a beat, and Kent hurriedly followed her lead.

"Well, it's true you weren't as worked up about him before," she conceded. Wil knew they were right, that the whole thing wasn't really a big deal. It had just been idle chatter before, I saw an Araphen jacket today, and ultimately it didn't really matter that much if he went to Araphen. Wil's reaction to a complete stranger spotting him outside of work was still totally out of proportion. But he couldn't figure out if he should feel crushed that the guy - who went to the best music university in the _country_ \- seemed to have completely brushed him off, or thrilled that he had _maybe_ complimented him, or figure out if he had even meant it as a compliment at all. He just wanted to talk about it to sort his own thoughts out, but now instead-

"How come you always end up picking on me!? Lynnnn!!"

"Now, now, don't be like that," she laughed. "You at least got his first name off of his coffee order, right? Why don't you tell us more about him?"

"I don't see why I should," Wil huffed and lifted his head, setting his hands back to work placing utensils in napkins. But it wasn't like he was actually mad at Lyn, so he answered anyway, "His name was Rath."

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Lyn suddenly went very, very still.

"Rath?" she repeated. "Rath Reglay?"

Reglay? "Uh, I don't think he was Etrurian," Wil started, but Lyn shook her head vigorously.

"No, no, he's Sacaean, but he's adopted," she cut in, abandoning her table setting half-finished so she could lean across the table towards Wil. "He was Sacaean, right? Tall?"

"Uh, yes? Do you know him?"

"Wil, he's _famous!_ " she exclaimed. Kent stared on from off to the side, looking lost. Wil felt he was probably making about the same expression as Kent. "In classical music," Lyn went on. "He was a child prodigy! He plays the morin khuur - it's a Sacaean instrument, so they're really rare in Lycia, and rarer still to find anyone who can teach it. No one else plays them in orchestras or grand concerts the way he does. He's one of a kind. My father used to play recordings of him for me all the time..." At that, Lyn's voice started to fade, and her gaze became distant. She still wasn't over what happened to her parents; Wil hadn't brought up any of this because he wanted to make her sad, so he clamored for the first thing he could think of to distract her.

"Wait, if he's a child prodigy, then how old is he? He looked older than I am," he blurted out.

She blinked some of the fog out of her eyes and focused on Wil again, as she answered, "No, he is older than you. He's about four years older than me, so he should be twenty-four now. But he's been playing professionally for more than ten years." More than ten years. Wil gaped despite himself. "He went to Araphen a couple years back. Last I heard, he was studying abroad in Etruria... I guess he finished that and came back here again."

"Why's he still going to school when he's already well-established?" Wil couldn't help but ask. Lyn rolled her eyes.

"He's dedicated to his craft," she shot, but instead of launching into a scolding, she suddenly stopped and looked at Wil with a new sense of appreciation. "I can't believe you met Rath Reglay," she uttered, in awe.

"Are you sure it was the same person?" asked Kent.

"Uhh," offered Wil.

"It has to be," Lyn declared. "I'm sure of it. Just look him up when your shift is done, Wil, you can confirm it for us!"

Kent glanced at the clock on the wall. "Speaking of work, we should clear these away. We're opening for dinner soon, Lyndis." Lyn and Wil swore in tandem, and the three of them promptly scrambled to pack away the extra table settings.

Wil actually liked customer service jobs - as much as most of his friends and coworkers called him crazy for it - but that day, he was glad Lyn had him working the dish pit instead. He was utterly out of sorts and completely distracted, and rather than having to deal with people or think about his words, it was much simpler to let his hands go through the motions of some grunt work and get lost in his own thoughts. (And even then, he caught himself keeping time with the spray of the hose and the clatter of dishes to calm down.)

All he'd been looking to do was tell someone about it once so he could convince himself it was nothing, get over it, and forget about the whole embarrassing ordeal, only to find out instead that the guy might be a one-of-a-kind high-class virtuoso. Wil felt like an idiot. His drumming was crazy, completely nonsensical; even though he set a hat out, he didn't even try for tips. He knew his street performances were hard to swallow for an average person; he couldn't even begin to imagine what he must have sounded like to a classical musician. Where he was unsure if he'd gotten a compliment before, now he was convinced that Rath had been making fun of him. Some celebrity meeting. He'd never heard of any 'Rath Reglay' before in his life, anyway.

He almost didn't want to look the guy up. Lyn seemed to admire him so much, it would definitely disappoint her if he didn't, but maybe Wil could just tell her it was a different guy after all, without really looking into it.

So he thought to himself during his hours over the dish pit, when his thoughts spun around in his head with no other place to go. But once all the closing work was done and the restaurant was locked up for the night, once Wil made his way across town to the 24-hour coffee shop where he had the employee password to leech off their wireless internet, once he started up his laptop and opened a browser, without even checking up on what he missed, he had already typed 'rath reglay' into a search.

It was, undoubtedly, him. The very first image was a deadringer for the man Wil had first met at the coffee shop, right down to the severe expression. Wil had just thought it was from caffeine deprivation at the time, but scrolling through the other image results, it seemed like maybe it was just his face. Rath was sharply dressed in formalwear in every photo, which suited him well, but made the years of his career bleed together. He looked about the same in recent photos as he did in ones taken three years prior. Even his hair barely changed. It was when Wil ran into a handful of pictures of Rath as a much younger teenager or maybe even a preteen, still unsmiling and dressed to the nines, that he started to feel weird about looking him up. He'd confirmed the man's identity a long time ago; he didn't really need to dig through all the rest of this.

But he didn't close the search just yet - not before flipping to the video results. He'd never heard of a morin khuur before, though he figured it must be the boxy string instrument Rath was often pictured with. Wil was curious to hear it, even if he was more curious to hear Rath, so he settled his headphones over his ears and hit play on the first video that popped up, a phone recording of a solo concert. It started with what must have been a normal level of propriety, but it was enough that Wil felt consciously out of place and underdressed even just watching; a host thanked everyone for attending, and then announced him, Rath Reglay, playing Distant Utopia on the morin khuur. The audience clapped as Rath bowed, and then quieted as he seated himself, readying his bow. He didn't have a sheet music stand, Wil noticed idly, just before Rath started to play.

From even the first few notes alone, Wil surmised that it was too different from the music he was used to for him to really appreciate. It was too slow, or maybe just too gentle. It never sped up. The audio quality on the video was piss-poor, and the song was more than seven minutes long.

And yet, it was beautiful.

Thinking back on it later on, Rath's tone was perfect, not the least bit sour, and a keening vibrato ebbed and flowed throughout the melody to draw out a greater depth to the song without overpowering the notes themselves. He easily folded complexity into the piece while making it sound effortlessly simple, unobtrusive to the listener's experience. Wil wasn't the right person to ask to judge someone's expertise with an instrument, but even he could tell that Rath was on a level far beyond "good." He was incredible.

But in the moment, Wil couldn't think about any of that. For the whole seven minutes, he was held motionless in his seat, and it felt like agony.

The melody resonated in his chest like the instrument itself was strung and played through his rib cage, like every trembling wail of the morin khuur was a wavering cry trying to rise out of Wil's own throat. Normally Wil anchored himself in the music he listened to by picking out the drumline and centering his focus there, but Rath had no accompaniment at all, leaving Wil stranded in the resonance of a wholly foreign instrument. Nothing Wil had ever heard or made before had felt like this, like the ache of tragedy that echoed back and forth between Rath's bow and Wil's heart.

When the last note faded out, Wil was left feeling hollow. It hardly even occurred to him that he had just broken down crying in public; it just wasn't that important, compared to clicking on the next song title he saw.

He stayed in that coffee shop for a good few hours, pouring through video after video of anything he could find with Rath's name on it, low-quality recordings and studio album previews and everything in between. He was so engrossed that when a woman placed a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, he nearly lept out of his chair and shrieked.

"Are you okay?" she asked, tangibly concerned, and now slightly frightened from his response.

"Fine! I'm fine! I'm-" Wil had to stop to sniff, briefly, his nose was running- "I'm so sorry, ma'am, please excuse me and I'll get right out of everyone's hair," he babbled, shutting down his laptop with shaking hands and hurriedly shoving it into his bag.

"Are you sure...?" she replied, confused and clearly doubtful. He gave her a watery smile.

"Just a little over-emotional tonight. I'm truly sorry to have disturbed you," he tried again, and felt he was more successfully reassuring that time, although his words were still broken up by sniffles and hiccups.

"All right," she said, at a loss, while he hefted his bag onto his shoulder.

"But thanks for your concern," he added, and then, "Excuse me," and moved past her for the exit.

He pulled out his phone as he pushed his way out the door and into the night air, calling the first person he could think of and listening to it ring as he started down the street, moving purely on instinct.

The call connected with a click. "Wil?" came the rough voice on the other end, already annoyed. "What do you want? It's one in the morning," he groused.

"You're always awake at one in the morning anyway," Wil retorted. The voice at the other end paused, probably taken aback by Wil's wet, raw tone.

"Are you crying?" he finally asked.

Wil didn't know what to say. He wanted to say, I just heard the most amazing sound I've ever heard in my life. I can practically feel my mind crawling back into old holes again, but for once it doesn't feel like they're going to eat me alive. Wil wanted to say, it's like there's some part of myself I've never really understood, but someone else has been giving it shape this whole time.

"You're off right now, aren't you?" Wil asked. "I'm coming over, okay?"

"Wha- give me a little warning first, would you-?"

It wasn't a real protest, so Wil added, "Be there in fifteen minutes," and hung up. The night air felt nice, even on his wet face. It reminded him to scrub the tears off with his sleeve as he walked.

Raven Cornwell was not on the up and up. Although he had two separate jobs that both paid him crazy well, he still stayed in a piss poor neighborhood where the only good thing about his otherwise broken down apartment were the thick walls. Wil used to wonder if he was just that bad at managing money, but he hated gambling and hated drinking and muttered dark, stingy thoughts every time Wil saw him have to pay for just about anything. He might have been in some kind of debt, instead. Wil never asked.

It was kind of a weird relationship. They barely shared anything with each other about themselves, except when they saw each other's worst sides by complete accident, like the time Wil passed out on Raven's kitchen floor from sleep deprivation, or the time Wil ended up spectating a shouting match when a pastor came knocking on Raven's door. But they had been friends for years somehow, and in the end, Raven always put up with Wil, even when Wil babbled on end at him about every single person he'd run into at work or on the street or in a club for the past week solid, or called on a whim in the middle of the night and waltzed up to Raven's front door roughly fifteen minutes later.

"Rave! Let's go clubbing." Wil beamed into Raven's permanently scowling face.

"You're not dressed for clubbing," he retorted, giving Wil's work pants and ratty jacket a disapproving once over.

"I'll just borrow your clothes again," Wil laughed, and started to nudge his way past him into the apartment. Raven stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"You okay?" Raven asked. His eyebrows furrowed together so fiercely, Wil could practically watch his wrinkles form in real time.

Wil beamed. Not even to reassure Raven, but just because he couldn't help himself. "If you don't go clubbing with me I'll just write music on your couch for the next seven hours. Without eating or sleeping!" Raven gave him a long-suffering look, which suited him a lot better than worry, in Wil's opinion.

"That's not an answer," he pointed out, but he also let his hand drop. Wil clasped his palms onto Raven's shoulders, instead.

"I feel amazing," he breathed out, like a confession. "So, just take my word for it and come celebrate with me."

And he did.

Raven was too serious the rest of the time, but when he went out, he really let loose. Wil let himself forget about his nine AM shift at the coffee shop coming up, and they hit up clubs, bars, anything that was still open and played music and would let in a pair of twenty-something-year-old men acting drunk and disorderly despite being stone cold sober. The night club speakers' pounding bass reverberated in Wil's bones, filled him to his teeth and fingertips, and unmade him until his thoughts all went silent, and he could no longer feel his own body over the thrumming of the lights and melody.

It was different from what Rath's music had done to him, a feeling he already knew well. It was exactly what Wil knew he'd needed.

And by the end of the night, he knew what he wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!
> 
> don't worry friends, Sain works there too. also I can't believe I forgot to tag this as slow burn before
> 
> here's [Distant Utopia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYoXfcLr7YQ) from the fe7 ost


	3. clashing

Louise was playing the piano, and someone else was singing. Rath knew his cue to accompany them was coming, but the voice morphed at some point from an operatic mezzo-soprano to a throaty warble, a sound that didn't seem to suit the piano at all, and he couldn't remember which of them he was supposed to match. His hands were too small when he took up his bow, and at his touch the string stretched too far outwards, unresisting. His finger drifted out along with it, further and further from the neck of the morin khuur, until his mother's hands closed tightly around his. He couldn't make out her face aside from its sternness, but he knew her calluses, and he knew her grip, and he knew her voice.

"No," she scolded him, without a hint of gentleness, and took command of his limbs through touch. "Like this," she said, "like this," and by her will his fingers moved through the proper motions. He couldn't feel his own hands moving, and he couldn't hear his own playing, but he knew the lullaby she led him through by heart, even before she opened her mouth and began to sing.

\--

Rath woke to silence.

His head was pounding. He sat up and reached out to turn on his bedside lamp, only for the light to pierce at his vision like needles. He rose to his feet while squinting, and padded his way over to his chest of drawers.

Although he often thought of her, it had been a long while since he last dreamed about his mother. At that time, years ago, he had still clearly remembered her face.

He could think of her features now, but he could tell, also, that it was a recollection built off the sight of the photos framed and stood up in various places around the Reglay manor. The details that he could imagine up closer, in flesh, in movement, stood out clearly from the rest in his mind. The corners of her eyes. The strict line of her mouth. It was more important that he still remembered the sound of her voice, but he couldn't think of any time he had seen her smile.

He didn't display any pictures in his apartment, but he had them. He drew the box containing them out of the topmost drawer and carried it with him out of the bedroom, switching on more lights as he went, illuminating the dim of the morning in spite of his thudding headache.

He had left most of the pictures, including all of the ones that held only Rath and his mother together, with Louise and Pent. He only felt the need to keep three of them with him. One was a picture of his mother standing next to Louise, and carrying Rath as a swaddled, sleeping infant. Louise, decked in pearls, had one arm around her shoulder and one hand at the crook of her arm, and was leaning comfortably closer. Rath's mother, in contrast, stood straight and unsmiling, dressed plainly in her work dress, but the slope of her shoulders was at ease.

Another was a picture of his mother in profile, sitting alone, with the morin khuur on her knee. She had stopped playing at the moment of the photo, or else hadn't started, so the bow dangled loosely at her side. She seemed unaware of her picture being taken, but she was laughing so openly that she hunched forward with the force of it, her face downturned. Rath didn't know when it had been taken.

The last was a proper portrait of her and his father, from when they had first come to Lycia.

Rath took all three of them from the box and spread them in front of him on the dining room table. With his elbows rested heavily on the flat of the table, he dragged his fingers through his hair and clutched at his scalp to keep the pounding at bay while he stared down at the photographs. He stayed like that, unmoving, and carved every detail of their features into his throbbing eyes.

The sound of his alarm went off in the bedroom, and he stood to go make his bed and brew himself a morning coffee.

\--

The next time Rath saw Wil was about a week after their second encounter, at the same subway platform, at the same time of day. He wasn't performing, this time. He was lying in wait.

"Hey!" he called out. Rath hadn't even taken notice of him, and would have passed by him if Wil hadn't reached out and grabbed for the crook of Rath's elbow. The grin Wil gave when Rath turned to face him was considerably broader than his service smile, enough to unsettle Rath up close. From this proximity, Rath could clearly see the shine in his eyes, as well as the bags underneath them. "It's Rath, right?"

"What do you want?" Rath asked. It came out as curtly as he intended, and Wil visibly flinched and let go of Rath's arm.

"Sorry," he said, and carded his fingers through his own hair to collect himself. With no real knowledge of Wil as a person or his intentions, Rath already considered walking away. For the time being, he didn't turn to fully face Wil, but Rath straightened his back and waited for an answer, a compromise between his own courtesy and reason. Wil was so animated and expressive that it was distracting; he hunched his shoulders and fidgeted excessively, little actions like scuffing his foot, tugging at the hems of his sleeves, and chewing on the inside of his cheek. Noisy, Rath thought. Not only his playing, but even his demeanor was noisy.

Eventually Wil finally collected himself enough to dig into one of his coat pockets, pull out out a flash drive, and hold it out as an offering. Wil didn't explain immediately, hesitating as if the words were clogged in his throat, but once a handful of them finally came loose, all of his thoughts seemed to pour from his mouth at once.

"I write music," he said. "I mean, really different from yours! I mean, you've already heard me play, but- er, I looked you up. Is that weird? I mean you're famous, but-" He shook his head. "Sorry! Sorry. The point is, I'd really- I would be so, so honored to write a song with you." Rath could only stare. Wil laughed nervously under his gaze and looked away from him as he went on, gesturing meaninglessly with the flash drive. "Though you must get people saying that all the time! Probably from people better than me, at that. There's a few songs on this but you don't have to listen all the way through, you might hate it already just from the first few seconds. Which is totally understandable! I mean, like I said, it's really... really different. I'm not even sure how I'd begin to write something more suited to what you play."

"If the difference is so wide, then why ask?" Rath cut in. Wil startled, and his eyes snapped back to Rath's face.

"Well-" he started. "Well, because you're amazing." It was the most confidently he had said anything so far, and though less pronounced, a smile returned to his face. "So, well, even if I don't really expect anything, I just thought it would be a complete waste if I didn't even try, you know? I'd regret it for the rest of my life."

Rath was no stranger to praise, but he couldn't grasp the meaning behind Wil's. It was difficult for him to envision his body of work from this person's perspective, a stranger whose percussion filled the air with a sense of mania. He didn't know what Wil sought out in music, couldn't figure out a way to determine just which notes, which songs, what facet of Rath's music had moved him so profoundly. It was simpler to assume that he was only interested in Rath's fame, even if Rath's audience, for the most part, wouldn't line up with Wil's at all.

But there was no feigning Wil's performance. Whatever his motivations, he was undoubtedly a musician. Rath thought back to the satisfied look on Pent's face over dinner in the summer, thought back to the ringing in his ears on the subway ride home a week's prior, and reached out to take the flash drive from Wil's outstretched hand.

"I'll listen to it," he said, and Wil's expression went comically dumbfounded. He gaped at his own empty hand and flexed his fingers like he couldn't figure out where the flash drive went.

"Uh," he said. "Wow. Okay. Here I was just thinking how stupid this idea was- oh my god." His wide-eyed gaze snapped back to Rath's face, and he exclaimed, "Oh my god, _really?_ "

"I make no guarantees," Rath began to say, but let the rest of his sentence trail off when Wil covered his face with both hands and let out a muffled wail. Rath was no longer sure why he had ever suspected Wil of being anything but a groupie.

"Yes! Right! Of course, you don't have to do anything unless you feel like it. We can meet up here again same time next week, I don't need to have your contact information or anything, and really, if you're not into it then you don't even need to show up, I'll get it! You'll never have to see me again, I won't become a stalker or anything, I swear!" That was going a little far, Rath thought. But the terms were workable enough, if strange.

"I'll show up," he cut in, and pocketed the flash drive. "Whether I'm interested or not. I'll answer you next week."

Wil beamed so brightly it nearly split his whole face open. His reply was swallowed by the roar of the train rolling in, but to Rath the matter seemed settled. Without another word, he turned on his heel to go.

\--

He almost forgot about it. It had been a unique encounter in Rath's life, but when he closed his eyes and willed away the phantom impression of a hand on his arm, the rattling of the subway car lulled his head back into his normal routine. His thoughts were full of classwork for the rest of his commute, reviewing the innovations of the old masters in the progression of music theory; it was only when he hung up his jacket in the foyer closet and felt the shape of the flash drive in his pocket that it came back to the forefront of his mind.

He decided to leave it playing while he cooked. He brought his bag into the kitchen with him and set it on the counter to pull out his laptop. Once it had started up, he toggled the wireless sound system to play through the speakers in the kitchen, plugged in the flashdrive, and opened the first file to play - "shatter.mp3."

The piano intro was soft enough that he left it there, and had already pulled out meat and onions by the time it distorted.

It wasn't pleasant to listen to.

The music cut in and out at odd times in a way that was clearly intentional but continually threw Rath off, jolting a part of himself that kept expecting the melody to continue with a full note. Aside from a mostly untouched electric guitar, the tone of each moving part was synthetically toned and manipulated; the vocal clips stuttered on looped notes and leapt around unnaturally in pitch, the sound of the piano twisted and fuzzed out at times as if poorly recorded, other instruments rendered almost unrecognizable weaved erratically in and out, and the thrum of the bass was strained downwards until it felt somehow waterlogged and disgusting. Rath continued chopping ingredients for a stir fry with the intention of letting the first track play to completion, but doubted he would listen to the rest. Even moreso than anything else, the use of ambient noise unsettled and distracted him; he just wasn't accustomed to music being interspersed with static, or the roar of an engine, or video game sound effects, or canned laughter.

The whole song derailed on the sound of a car crash, and Rath's knife slipped and opened a red line across his knuckle.

He whirled on his laptop to stop the track, snatched at the roll of paper towels right next to it, and held one to the cut before he bled too much on anything. It was a fairly shallow injury; if Rath was wound up and breathing harshly, it was because of the music.

He played something else. A traditionalist recital of _A Mother's Wish_ in C major, twelve minutes long.

After an incident with a violin string, Rath had learned to keep a first aid kit at home, and went to fetch it from the bathroom with the orchestra's gentle music following behind him. The tempo of the song was out of alignment with the pounding of Rath's heart in his throat. He finally managed to bandage the cut, in spite of his unsteady hands, and leaned heavily against the sink to collect himself. He stared down at his shaking fingers while waiting for them to still, at the skintone bandaid that was darker than his palms but lighter than the rest of him.

He went back to the kitchen. He finished making dinner, poured coffee grinds into the machine to brew, and in the space between one song and the next he relocated to the study and set up at his desk. By then, the bleeding had already slowed.

\--

He slept dreamlessly, that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was late as hell and the next one probably will be too but I'll try to get back to my original monthly update schedule after that. please cheer me on friends
> 
> Wil's song is titled after [Shattered Life](https://youtu.be/dTu4EbifwZw), so imagine something like that, but chipmunked and run through a woodchipper with screaming. the song Rath plays after is titled after [Bern - A Mother's Wishes](https://youtu.be/fsb5ZMj6QT8).


	4. movement

Rath caught himself drumming his fingers in class.

It wasn't a usual habit for him. He ceased almost as soon as he started, and found himself staring down at his own hand while the lecture continued at the edge of his vision. The bandage was positioned high enough that each of his first finger's "taps" in the brief sequence had ended up muffled.

The rhythm was a portion of the beat from Wil's song. Rath's fingertips still itched with it. When he thought on it further, he realized he had heard it before, as a briefly interwoven pattern on the subway platform. The performance from then and the file on the flashdrive were otherwise fairly dissimilar, and he hadn't focused on the percussion when listening to the latter, so it hadn't immediately struck him as familiar.

But clearly, it had stayed with him. Not only the rhythm, but also the melody Wil had overlaid on top of it - piano chords interspersed with computerized high notes that scraped against his ear, with a pause just a little too long in between certain notes. Wil's melodies were simplistic, but he used them like tools, both to ground the listener and to disorient them. He created expectations in his audience just to flip them on their heads. The more Rath replayed what he could recall in his head, the more he made sense of the chaos. It had almost felt like several different songs crushed together when he first heard it, but upon reflection, Rath started to think that it was arranged with every part leading into the next, almost like a story.

He wanted to listen to it again.

He wanted to listen to it through to the end.

It was early enough in the semester that it didn't particularly matter that he hadn't absorbed half the lecture.

\--

He took off the bandaid around midday. It was attracting too much attention; several people who had never spoken to him before approached him to ask when his finger would heal, or if he had injured himself snapping a string. He had been raised to show appreciation when shown consideration or concern, and responded to each of them with reassurances that he was fine, but it was impossible for him to properly pay attention to anything when he was constantly disrupted, without pattern or routine, whether in the middle of a lecture or on the footpaths between buildings, by a tap on the arm or a call of his name. The scab left behind was a dark, angry red, but ultimately smaller and less eye-catching. His peers went back to leaving him largely to his own devices.

But even without the inconsistent disturbance of various classmates and strangers, Rath couldn't focus. He willed one class to end sooner, then the next, then the next. Even if his grades could afford one day of poor performance early on in the year, allowing himself to continue on in this state would throw more than his studies into disarray.

He wasn't hungry when his last class for the day let out. Dinner could wait, this time, until after he listened to Wil's music again.

For lack of a better place to put it, Rath had simply left the flashdrive on the kitchen counter the night before. He retrieved it and brought it with him into the apartment's study, where he settled into a sturdy armchair and once more opened its contents on his laptop screen.

Knowing most of the song's twists from his first listen, it jolted him far less the second time around. Rath felt himself bracing in anticipation for the song's climax as it approached, and as it passed, he didn't even flinch. With his own nerves out of the way, he could hear better how the sound effects were meant to emphasize the melody instead of distracting from it, and it was easier to surmise the song's construction, the sense to its progression, and the guitar chord every other element was, in some way or another, inevitably anchored to.

The end was discordant and sudden. The still air of the study felt hollow in its wake, but the dry feeling of dissatisfaction Rath was left behind with was, in a way, a sign of his own accomplishment: in this moment, with the hamfisted sensation of a rug being pulled out from under him, he knew exactly what Wil had done to him and how.

Still, Rath's fingers itched.

He closed his eyes and let the next song play automatically. It was slower and more musical, and for a newcomer to Wil's tactics, much easier to stomach. Rath couldn't guess why Wil hadn't started with this one, even if it was also a little less interesting. As the playlist went on, it became clear that it was arranged to showcase Wil's range, shifting genres and tempos, but in some ways, it only served to do just the opposite. On a technical level, Wil's age and inexperience flagrantly showed themselves throughout his work; changing the tone and most of the instruments stripped away the veil over his formulaic construction, and starkly highlighted the themes and patterns he leaned on too heavily. The third and fourth tracks were different from either of the first two, and different from each other, but both were simpler, with fewer twists; they could nearly have been called unremarkable, if it weren't for the distorted instrumentation, the interspersed scraping and crunching of metal Wil seemed to put in every song, or the strange mood - almost cheerful, but too harsh, like his drumming. The more Rath heard it, the more it drew him in.

The final song was strikingly simple, in that it was more like the skeleton of one. The name of the file was "NOT DONE.mp3," but with the inconsistent naming scheme of the rest of the files, Rath had assumed it was a title, rather than a declaration. It had no effects, no sound clips, only a standard collection of drums and an electric guitar.

But even at its base, it was differently constructed from the rest, much slower, and with a more even build up than Wil's usual stark abruptness. It was a kind of song Rath would never consider such an elaborate line of percussion for, but it was a testament to Wil's skill at drumming that it remained understated, without overriding the melancholy in the piece. As a work in progress, it was shorter than the others, still tangibly cobbled together and unrefined, and yet with how dissimilar it sounded to everything else on the list, Rath still felt the same tension, pulling at him. Rath wondered if that tone was why Wil's music lingered so strongly in his thoughts - the reason Rath had reached out and accepted the flashdrive.

He got up to make coffee and heat up leftovers.

When he returned to his desk with food and caffeine, he looked up other electronic music. Because he was inexperienced, it resulted in a time-consuming exercise involving scrolling through a number of articles and forums for reviews and recommendations, and he had purchased three separate albums before realizing that the majority of EDM artists made some or most of their songs legally available for free.

As he sifted through libraries of songs, he came to realize that Wil's music was less representative of his field than Rath had expected. Some of the songs Rath listened to struck him as comparatively basic and unobjectionable, as could be expected of most contemporary music genres, but most of it was more polished, more cohesive, and more immediately impressive. Setting aside the obvious similarities, the sound effects and voice clips and the "grimy" instrumentation, most other artists' arranged their music to feel vast and epic, using echoing or multiplying the voices and instruments, or escalating a note from faint to loud, just like cymbals in an orchestra. While Wil had occasionally made use of the same techniques, in comparison, his music - even the third track, the mood of which had conveyed something of a sense of euphoria - was almost claustrophobic.

Rath's reactions to other songs weren't so pronounced. It was likely exactly that feeling that had drawn him in.

He retrieved his morin khuur from his bedroom. Bright, but claustrophobic. If Rath wanted to recreate that feeling, it was strongest in "shatter."

With the number of elements composing the song, he had to simplify it heavily to be played on one instrument, but he was accustomed to writing his own arrangements for other's songs, and this was only personal practice. There should have been little difficulty. He played a basic movement from it, first, then repeated it with more complexity, with a fast-paced, frenetic sort of playing that Rath didn't often use but was far from unused to. He rearranged it several more times, unsatisfied, before he tried another verse in the same way. Then another of Wil's songs, and then another, with increasing frustration.

Rath stopped because his cut had reopened. He jerked his hand away from the morin khuur the moment he realized, just barely soon enough that a drop of blood fell to the carpet instead of staining the wooden base. He held his knuckle to his mouth to avoid spilling anything more than that, and very carefully stood up and set the morin khuur and its bow on his chair one-handed. Once he looked over the strings to make certain he hadn't stained them without noticing, and was satisfied to see that he hadn't, he went to the bathroom and applied a new bandage.

Years ago, Rath had received his fair share of criticism for his renditions of happier songs. Not everyone said the same, but he agreed even then with the reviews that described his recitals of _Ride the Wind_ or _Ships and Homes_ as mechanical and soulless. He didn't care for the speculation that made its way around because of it, that Rath's joyless music reflected his tragic life, but it was irrefutably clear to his ear that he had played the notes as they were written and nothing more. He improved over time, and public opinion followed. Not since then had he ever felt that his playing sounded hollow. Not until now.

It wasn't a matter of lacking drums and artificial tuning. He knew very well the limitations of the morin khuur, and the depths of what it could express. This was Rath's own failing.

When he returned to the study, he squinted at the dark spot on the carpet, and then at the time on his laptop.

3 AM.

He brewed himself another mug of coffee. All-nighters were nothing new.

\--

The remainder of the week went without incident. Rath could concentrate again. The cut on his finger invited more questions, but it healed soon enough. Even on the day he intended to give Wil his answer, Rath's focus didn't stray from his classrooms until he himself did.

Through sheer habit, he arrived at the subway platform ten minutes earlier than their planned meeting time. He lingered at the top of the last flight of stairs to survey the crowd, and found that Wil had showed up even earlier. He stood against a pillar with his hands shoved in his coat pockets and stayed more or less in one place, aside from pulling out his phone to glance at it from time to time, and the fidgeting. Drumming his fingers against his leg, tapping his heel against the pillar. Rath had nearly cleared the entire distance between them when Wil finally happened to look up and notice his approach.

"Rath!" he called out, and almost stumbled in the midst of pushing himself away from the pillar and straightening himself up. Rath had never seen someone's face light up so quickly. Or twist with dread so immediately after.

From the look on his face, Wil couldn't bring himself to ask. Pleasantries were unlikely to soothe his nerves, and a subway platform was a poor setting for more than a brief exchange in the first place, so Rath wasted no time. "Give me your email."

"What?" said Wil.

"Your email." Wil just stared at him with a numb sort of expression, so Rath held out a hand expectantly. "Or let me give you mine. I'll give you my number if that's what you prefer, but only for texting."

Wil placed his phone in Rath's hand without appearing to even think about it, as if well-trained. "Wait," he finally said, after Rath had already tapped at the screen until he figured how to add a new contact on this model. "Is this, you know... Are you saying..."

"I'll collaborate with you," Rath confirmed.

"One sec," Wil said, and then he spun around to face away from Rath and screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Ride the Wind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voWnZY7V_XI&index=24&list=PLA0005A166A014EF4) and [Ships and Homes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ySo-48ACA&list=PLA0005A166A014EF4&index=59).
> 
> I'm late like I predicted but not as late as I thought!! PRAISE ME


End file.
